The Transition continued ...............

Hmmmm, I was going to wait until I was rested before I posted and as you can see it's been almost a month and I'm still not rested so decided I better go ahead ;-) We are all feeling and acting somewhat human at this point which is a huge improvement over our first 3-4 weeks home. Without a doubt this adjustment period has been the most difficult of our adoptions. I totally underestimated the effect having a new 47 lb addition to the family would have on everyone. That being said, I'd do it over again in a heartbeat ! Our new son is so amazing I can't even tell you. He is very artistic and loves to draw and color, He is extremely intelligent and can print almost as well as I can, He is a perfectionist which I'm not used to but I'm liking better every day ;-), He is a serious Chinese nationalist at the age of 5 which has been interesting. He loves China immensely and speaks passionately about it whenever given the chance. As one of our travel families so perfectly put it, "He is not your typical orphanage kid". When you meet Lei you will find a child who is ahead developmentally if anything and who (other than dental care) is as healthy as his new sisters.

Lei refers to the orphanage director as "Mama" along with some chinese words which I don't understand but I find it interesting that she was a mother figure to all the children at his very small orphanage. Lei has a couple of photo albums from the orphanage and at least a couple times a week we get them out and he tells me about all of his friends and the director. I find it very unusual because he understands some of the childrens special needs and actually will explain them to me. Last night he was explaining one of his friends and showed me a picture and proceeded to mimick a cleft lip repair and even pointed inside his mouth I'm guessing referring to palate problem and swallowing. It was really mind boggling to me that a 5 year old was describing this to me. Another thing he was showing and mimicking to me was the "Gotcha" days of some of the children I had photos of that were from a couple years ago from the orphanage (other families had given to me). He would talk about their "Mama and Baba" coming from Mei Guo (America) and then he would mimick crying and I wasn't sure if he was talking about the parents crying or the babies or both. What an amazing thing for him to remember and I'm so glad he has his own Mama and Baba now :-)

The language barrier has not been easy but we have not had any major issues related to it. I'm so happy that over the past week Lei has really started taking off with his English. Because he was so proficient in Mandarin it took a little longer than we expected for him to become motivated to speak english. His pronunciation of just about anything is fantastic. The other night he came up to me and said "hummingbird" as plain as day. We have a feeder outside the kitchen window so we talk about the birds alot and he obviously has picked up on it. Also, this morning him and Audrey were playing a game and I hear him say "It's my turn". Now that he is enjoying using English, I think he is going to learn very fast. He is so self-driven and motivated to learn whatever he wants to it is scary.

Audrey and Rachel are doing really well now, but this transition has been as hard on them as anybody. Ever since we arrived home, Ms. Rachel has had some major sleep issues and we've ended up co-sleeping with her. The poor thing broke out in eczema patches all over too which she only does when she is seriously stressed. Audrey has developed a major case of premature PMS lol. She has always been my most even tempered non-moody child but as I said before, we've all had major adjustments ;-) Lei has been fairly content with the exception of getting really mad at his sisters occassionally which he gets over fairly quick if left alone.

Ok, I've said more than enough, but I'll end on a funny note. The other day someone came up to Lei at the gymnastics center and started talking to him. Audrey was standing there and she promptly intervened and told the little girl "He doesn't understand you, He's still Chinese" ;-) This may be my favorite quote of all time lol.

Above I've posted a few Pics we took before church this morning.